In the pursuit to become strong, fast and athletic, we humans have come up with some pretty radical solutions to add resistance and make training increasingly challenging. The king of all resistance forces is and always will be gravity, or should I say, working against gravity. It’s in our DNA. It’s what has influenced the structure of our bodies and the way you look. If you’re butt-ugly, now is your chance to blame this universal force… along with your parents for good measure.

However, there is one big limitation to gravity – it works in only one direction. What a bitch, huh? This is where MASS SUIT comes into play. It attaches to your body and using resistance bands, provides resistance in almost every imaginable direction. When you put it on, you feel like you’re part of a physiological experiment… which is pretty cool. Let’s see what the company as the say.

Product Name: Mass SuitCompany: Juke Performance Inc.MSRP: $299.95Availability: Low (From company only as far as I can tell)

Official Description

The MASS suit is a unique patented design used by many professionals to provide resistance training to your entire body by using rubber resistance bands. The resistance starts as soon as you clip the bands while just standing before doing any type of athletic movement. The MASS Suit increases the resistance to your shoulders, arms, back, core, hip flex, quads, and hamstrings by attaching the MASS sleeves, straps and rubber cords to your body, elbows, hands, knees, and feet. This will create more speed, strength, power, stamina, fast twitch muscles and a more grounded stable balance while cutting calories and losing weight. By intensifying your training you will increase the levels of your red blood cells which will amplify your endurance and muscle speed.

Your breathing will also increase and that will create more oxygen intake and that too will help multiply red blood cells for increased stamina and power. The unique design of the MASS Suit is ideal for every type of athlete in every sport to intensify their training routine. The MASS Suit is adjustable which will able you to increase or decrease in resistance depending on how strong or fatigued you are. As your body adapts to your workouts and you need to pick up and push your conditioning, the MASS Suit will intensify your training up to 75% by adding more resistance to your punches, elbows, kicks, knees and core.

First Impressions

I usually get a lot of emails from companies asking me to test out their “revolutionary” new product. Well here’s a surprise – most of them aren’t. This though, had me more excited than a fat kid who discovered a stale oreo under his couch. I saw that champs such as Anderson Silva were using it to improve their game so surely, it must be something special because let’s face it, whether you’re a fight fan or not, The Spider Silva is the shit!

But it’s not just the MMA application which put a huge grin on my face. I saw that it could be used with other sports such as swimming, football, basketball etc. It’s customization options were practically limitless. Awesome.

Once it arrived, I was glad to see it came in a handy little gym bag. it’s a perfect fit and doesn’t look cheesy as hell unlike other branded products you might have to carry around. Inside you get a brochure, manual and some instructions – which you’ll need because putting this on for the first time is a pain in the ass. Partially because there are a few different variations of the suit and the instructions you get inside the box aren’t exactly the same as the product you receive. Either way, help was just an email away but I would like to see consistency across the board.

Once you manage to get on the basics such as the chest vest, elbow wrap, ankle boots and knee wraps, it’s time to attach the bands. Again, if it’s your first time then I would highly recommend some third party assistance since once you start piling on the resistance, you’ll move like you walked out of the special needs gym class.

It feels… different. Almost every action you take requires wayyy more effort than you would regularly want to put in. This includes, walking, sitting, grabbing, reaching etc. The website claims you can easily conceal this under clothing and burn extra calories doing normal daily activities. Uh, bullshit. The only way you’re going to conceal this is if the clothes you buy are twice your normal size and more baggy than a thugged out wankster.

Real World Results

I’m going to start off with disappointments and possible suggestions to anyone listening from the company since that’s how I like to roll. First up, this “once size fits all” thing is stupid. I realized that anyone at 140lbs or less (which is me during summer time) is in for a watered down experience. When you “suit up”, the straps are all maxed out and sticking out, which makes you look like you’re peeling black Velcro skin from every angle. Then there’s the problem of resistance. See, Mass Suit relies on bands which provide a challenge when stretched. So the resistance my training partner felt (who is taller and weighs about 30lbs more) was much higher than the resistance I felt.

So I almost felt cheated since I would be paying to make my training more challenging, but I’d end up feeling 2/3 of the resistance a man slightly taller than me would feel. Uncool. I suggest that the Mass Suit come in two sizes, small and large. No need for medium since the straps are adjustable and should easily cover that range of people.

Next is the issue of comfort. If you’re planning on suiting up with just a light T-shirt and shorts, I’d think twice because after just a 15 minute kickboxing session, my training partner had marks left over from the plastic part of the straps (see pic below). This isn’t a huge deal at first, but if you’re planning on using this suit 3 or even 4 times a week, expect to get rashes. Of course, this can all be mitigated by wearing long sleeves and pants. I found that the Under Armour type of material is an excellent option to use with Mass Suit. It also makes you look incredibly sexy.

Other than those two shortcomings, it’s pretty much uphill from there. You can ditch the elbow and the handles for resistance for sports that just need your lower body such as soccer, basketball etc. Or you can attach everything and go full out. The only thing I would say is that when doing kickboxing (which is a huge push for this product) the angle of resistance that you get from the handles isn’t optimal. It attaches to your hips, which means it pulls your hands DOWN. The force vector of a punch is pretty much perpendicular to the body, therefore the resistance should be in the complete opposite direction (attached to the shoulders). For this reason, I don’t recommend you train punches with the handles, just leave the elbow bands attach and that’s good enough.

When it comes to KICKS however, it’s all aces. Everything is in the right spot to provide some serious challenge to your front, round and side kicks. I’ve thrown together a video below where I’m helping my trainer partner perfect the explosiveness of his kicks. As you’ll probably notice, he looks a little awkward doing them since it was his first time with the Mass Suit. After some practice though, he was kicking almost as fast as he used to, and when the suit came off, we found some untapped power coming from his legs. His hands did pretty well too.

Besides combat sports, I tried this with soccer and gymnastics. For soccer you can just leave the upper body bands to the side and get a serious workout running around with the knee and ankle bands. Since my bike had a flat ass tire, I couldn’t really test it thoroughly but I can definitely see it as a useful tool for the tools that love biking in their tight pieces of clothing. Couple that up with some uphill pedaling and you’ve got yourself a challenge, my friend.

Then there is gymnastics. When it comes to tumbling and floor skills, it’s only useful some of the time because there are certain tricks that involve your body to contract instead of expand making the bands useless. But for events such as rings, parallel bars and vault I can see it come in handy since you need to hit the handstand position quite often, and the Mass Suit is fucking awesome for handstands. I was going to throw it on some of the high level male gymnasts that train at my gym but these guys just weren’t big enough for it to be of any use. Oh well.

And obviously, besides using the suit for sport-specific training, you can use the Mass Suit during your normal gym session as well. It’ll add some extra pain to your squats, deadlifts, bench presses, overhead presses etc. One of my favourites with the Mass Suit was the seated dumbbell clean and press. Shit was tough as hell and the bands helped me get past my plateau and add 10lbs to each side in a few weeks. I was more explosive too… can’t complain with those results.

Conclusion

So the Mass Suit is pretty effective most of the time, but is for you? Well if you’re a smaller person, do recreational sports and have no money then no, it ain’t. You’re better off spending the 300 bones on a year’s worth of gym membership fees and training hard against gravity. However, for the serious athlete that has done everything under the sun and needs the extra edge to get ahead, I would say it’s a pretty hefty but worthwhile investment. I’m talking college/NFL level football players, college/NBA level basketball players, professional fighters, national/international level soccer players, competitive Olympic weightlifters etc.

Overall I was quite impressed with the Mass Suit and will give it 4/5 stars. It works great and I love the innovation but it’s got some kinks to work out such as comfort, proper sizing and that price could use a drop as well. I’m going to give it my…

…I haven’t given these out in a while but I figured the Mass Suit is pretty deserving. If you’re a serious athlete, I’d give this piece of equipment a try. It’ll take a few tries to get used to but once you do, it’ll serve you well.

- FitJerk

Pictures

Turns fat asses into good looking bad asses. Also a National deadlift record holder and the undisputed flip-cup champion. If you want to train under him, Click Here to fill out an application, and he just may consider working with you.

Hey, thanks for the advice on this peice of equipment. I’m not going to buy this item, because I’m 5’6″ and 159lbs. Are there any resistance bands that you would recommend. I use the ankles ones. They’re pretty good. How about the ones that connect to the thighs? Thanks, again. Ken

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About The Jerk…

Yes, there's a legitimate man behind the persona. Surprised? Don't be. Unlike most fitness "GooRoos" that are about as hard as a soaking turd, FJ stays at 7-9% body fat year-round. He holds a National Record in the deadlift, is a Certified Level 2 Gymnastics Coach ...See More

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